MAriana Sapun has a big black suitcase. It’s on top of her closet, ready to hand. She could always grab her seven things and leave Germany again. Because Mariana is plagued by a terrible homesickness – for the Ukraine, for her old life, her formerly ideal world. But the 37-year-old woman’s gratitude for her new start in Germany seems to be just as great as her grief for the past and those left behind, above all her parents and her husband. “I know it was the right decision. Here we are protected, out of the danger zone,” says Mariana Sapun about her escape. “I did it all because of the kids.”

Son Kyrylo is eleven years old, daughter Diana is 16 and needs round-the-clock care because of her disability. After Russia’s attack on Ukraine began, Mariana Sapun discussed daily with her husband: to go or to stay? She turned down the first couple of offers to flee. But when the rockets landed just 200 meters from her home in Kiev, the mother knew she had to flee – for the sake of her children. Mariana, Diana and Kyrylo Sapun, together with more than a hundred other parents and their “special children”, as they are called in Ukraine, left the country on a train organized by the Klitschko Foundation.

grasping at every straw

Sapun’s husband, a professional soldier, was drafted right at the beginning of the war. He lost the right to move freely. He was only allowed to accompany his wife and two children to the platform and wave them goodbye. Back then, Mariana Sapun only had the bare essentials in her luggage. “I was very afraid that we wouldn’t be able to take the wheelchair on the train due to lack of space,” she recalls. Because without it, Diana cannot move. Fortunately, the aid was allowed to travel to Kelsterbach, where the three of them, like other Ukrainian families with children with disabilities, have been staying in a hotel since the spring.

Daughter Diana has a life-shortening illness. She has had cerebral palsy since birth, a movement disorder caused by brain damage in early childhood. She also suffers from spastic paralysis, a spinal curvature and a dislocated hip. Nobody can predict how old Diana will be with the disease. What is certain is that she has significantly less time than healthy children. Mariana Sapun is actually qualified to work as a Ukrainian teacher, but her daughter has a full-time job. She has to be fed and washed and is dependent on her wheelchair. In the Ukraine, her husband brought the money home, says Sapun, and she spent it – on Diana. Because medical services have a high price in the home country of the family.